# 1
I woke up in the green. I had no idea how I got there and no idea how to get away. Giant pulsating fruits and trembling, sticky membranes terrorised me from every angle, their scents weirding into my nostrils, their colours invading up my eyes.
I stumbled about, bumbling away from one fibrous knotty spurt into the next tumorous clump and on, my feet and hands struggling to keep themselves away from all the spores and pores and dangles at the same time as keeping my head safe. It was a desperate panicky fight between me and alarmingly present sensoria.
Sweat formed all over my body and interfered with my clothes in the vegetable heat as I moved. Powders stuck to the sweat. Things invaded my nails, populated my eyes and angled down my throat, stifling all attempts to cry for help as I blundered senselessly on.
At some point I managed a garbled, “Hellllllp…” before a winged something buzzed down my gullet.
Shortly thereafter a wispy glowing light swerved out of the general entanglement ahead, putting my jitters into overdrive and causing me to swerve in an alternate direction. Then came another floating wisp. And another. Each causing me to change course.
One startled me so much I ducked left instead of right and this time I realised that the undergrowth I avoided had concealed a pink bladder that inflated into the spot where I would have been. So I started to trust the wisps.
I bumbled on, slowing now through exhaustion and fear, calmed by my strange helpers. I could still see no end to the green.
Finally, reacting to the rapid shaking of another floating orb ahead, I tottered away from a seemingly innocent patch of grass and into a giant, hairy pod that closed about me with an excited belch.
It was there that they found me, extended moments that could have been minutes or hours later. Trousers soaked with lurid juices, alien hairs tickling regions unused to such touches, mouth screaming really loud at the awfully real nature of all of the things.
I was terrified, true, but more importantly, I was undigested.
# 2
Upon being pried free, I tempered my screams to whimpers but could not completely stop. Their appearance did not encourage calmness.
Everything about them bristled and pulsed in much the same way as the vegetation. Smooth patches were rare and when they did occur they always seemed to be accompanied by rude unsmoothnesses in directly adjacent regions. Tufts, pustules, crumbly bits. They surely were human, but only just. I failed to identify a single eye, nose or lip. Despite not being bound I very much kept my hands to myself as they bore me along.
Hands grasped me, but I couldn’t understand how amidst all of that organic tumult. Voices reached, but only as shrieking sounds, away from meaning. Movements were slow and strange, size more exaggerated. Some of them were huge! I unfolded through the undergrowth at a strange rate, borne by their bristling hedge of unidentifiable protuberances.
The most calming things around continued to be the little floating lights, which followed now in a flock. Their patient, hovering bobs, soothing curves and steady flickerings provided brief moments of calm for my overstimulated eyes as the forest canopy drifted by. At some point I succeeded in reaching out to grab one that came too close, hoping to sense its smoothness. It fizzled and went out, pop!, upsetting my vegetable hosts with a burst of lancing energy.
After that they sedated me with awkward dabs of some raucous orange vegetation. This served to stop my shrills and bellows as their roil of living matter conveyed me through the green.
I watched the light change, feeling increasingly dislocated from sensation while the day unfolded in hues and shades around me, warming, swelling and then softening as the tones of evening began to descend.
The shadows deepening to blue, we arrived at our destination, a huge, sprawling behemoth of multiple canopies that towered above the other growths in the vicinity. Its twisted trunks spiralling upwards into the gloom opened up a large space beneath. Around the main trunk, a tent of sorts had been erected. The procession slowed to a stop in front of it.
Forced to re-engage with events, things began to feel more alarming. I was delivered, with much shrieking, into the tendrils of three vaguely distinct forms, one of which had a clear face. Though several of its sensory organs were unexpected and attempted to sense me in ways that, even in my drugged state, I could only recoil from. Nevertheless, the sight of human features reduced my terror significantly. I might not have been able to remember who I was or how I got there, but I knew that I also had a face.
The moving hedge roiled off into the green, shrieking. When it was gone this smiling being greeted me with words that I understood and bid me welcome.
Standing on my own two feet again, I looked around. Despite being inside of a structure of sorts there was almost nothing to distinguish it from the outside, except that it was darker within. Everywhere I looked seemed to be a confusing mass of blotchy living matter. I felt the world starting to spin and wished to sit down but didn’t trust my surroundings enough to do so. Nausea rose within me. Observing this, a tendril proffered a gently throbbing gourd into which I was violently sick.
The gourd appeared to have been awaiting my effluence and indeed to feed on it, closing up and flushing a satisfied yellow. This reaction elicited various shrieks from the second and third forms. Meanwhile the one with the face was peering at me with concern.
Through a short exchange we mutually established that I couldn’t remember who I was. As it seemed, they had no clue either. Though they did have some experience in such affairs. Apparently I wasn’t the first to have been found wailing out there in the green with no previous memories. They would take me to somebody who could help.
# 3
This was how I came to meet Schhhrtk, who seemed to understand my general shock and confusion. He lived in another tent-like dwelling some horrid minutes through the all encompassing. In the fading light he appeared to be fully human.
We arrived as the forest was deepening to blackness, negating the golds and reds of the sky. I had been carried there by the second form, which was the strongest. The other two, the one with the face and the third, had come along too. They had to, being connected to one another by thick root-like cables an arm span or so in length.
Schhhrtk greeted me with an actual hand and bid the other three take their leave. He showed me that he had cleared a corner of his shelter’s interior of living things, by scraping down to the earth beneath and stamping the rich loam to something approaching flat and monochrome. Keeping that steady hand on my quivering form as parts of his home brushed past, our way illuminated in blues by a small group of the glowing wisps, he led me to the square of earth and encouraged me to squat down. Tumbling into its bareness had an immediately calming effect. I breathed out for what felt like the first time since my arrival and pressed my whole body upon the cool ground.
Shhhrkt had known that it would have this effect. He explained that scraping the square of earth had been his first move upon finding himself there. They had not liked it, had shrieked protests at his murderous attacks on the life he scraped, but on seeing how it calmed him they had permitted the square to be maintained, conditional upon the peripheries being managed in a way that was persuasive without causing more damage to the green.
At first he had needed to carry the inevitable sproutings out of the soil with his fingers and allow them to bed down elsewhere. Now, although he rarely needed the square himself anymore, he had found himself continuing to tend it in homage to the mystery of his own origins –- he too had no idea what his previous name was or where he had been before his arrival.
That empty patch of earth was a blankness for a blankness.
That night I brushed, peeled and scraped myself down as best I could before nestling into its calmness and burrowing into my smooth, orderly, heavily stained clothes. Tucking hands into sleeves and chin to collar with great relief, pondering the question of who I might be and why I could possibly be here, I fell into a deep sleep.
# 4
I awoke to the feeling of something latching itself to my face. I leaped up with a start, reaching for the thing and attempting to fling it away. There was a roar and a rapid shambling retreat. It was another being, though which part of it had been doing the latching, I wasn’t sure. All I saw was a back bristling with branches and fungal welts disappearing through the tent awnings into bright sunlight.
“Don’t worry,” Schhhrtk said, approaching out of the gloom. “She was just curious.”
Everything came rushing back to me in a wave of horror and I began to moan. Schhhrtk held out a dead rock toward me. Also scraped clean of natures’ vigorous grip, the stone had a shallow depression into which Schhhrtk dripped a liquid from somewhere about his person. He convinced me to try it simply by saying, “It’ll help. It contains suppressants…”
I slurped it up eagerly, experiencing the roughness of the rock against my tongue as something strange but finding comfort in the cool nature of the stone. The juice was raw and heady. Various parts of my sensibility battled for control over the value of the overall effect, weighing up the unrefined crassness of its ferment with other more pressing needs such as increasing sensory damping. It worked rather rapidly, proving heavier and more lusty than whatever they had calmed me with the day before. Realising this, and supposing therefore that they must have some grasp on the idea of consent calmed me further. As did knowing that Schhhrkt was there, another human like me, who didn’t know who he was before.
Schhhrkt smiled at me. I tried to return a smile of my own, but the touch of that sucking thing on my face was difficult to forget. As was the world I found myself in. I lapped more juice from the stone and squinted about the place with fresh eyes.
By now the sun was well up outside. Bright, vibrant greens lanced in through the tent’s awnings, dazzling me and making it hard to see what else was in there with us. Steadily, the piercing range of greens cut less into my innards. I gestured to Schhhrkt for more.
He obliged, stepping forward.
Now that my eyes had adjusted I watched as he lifted one arm and squeezed a firm, distended bulge of skin below his elbow with the other hand. In response, a dribble of the precious juice was expressed from a cluster of yellow, vein-like tubes at his wrist to fill the depression in the stone. I looked at him looking at me observing the clear signs that he was no longer fully human. Me grasping that I had drunk of him. Our eyes performed a silent dance of comprehension around stone, wrist and each other’s faces. His compassionate eyes told me to be calm.
I couldn’t see what else I could do. The alcohol was definitely helping, so I took another slurp, any awareness of taste now gone. Behind my eyes, I vowed that as soon as I could, I would figure out a way to get the heck out of the green.
# 5
By my reckoning, it was about a week before I made a break for it. I didn’t want to rush things. I knew that first I had to orientate myself and regain strength.
For the rest of that morning, I surveyed the contents of the tent from my bare patch of earth. Schhhrkt lived quite simply, so there wasn’t actually that much to it once the juice kicked in and I was able to focus on things without freaking out.
By using the word tent I perhaps gave the impression that the structure we were in was built. I’d thought so last night, but on closer inspection, this turned out not to be the case. Schhhrkt explained that it was actually a collection of large leaves that the tree had grown for us to live under, to keep us undercover whilst we underwent ‘Sprrrrt’. He didn’t explain what this meant but already the word put me on edge. It seemed my arrival here wasn’t the complete surprise they seemed to have suggested yesterday.
In the centre of the dwelling was a raised, U-shaped mound that functioned as a communal sitting place. Like everything there, it was grown rather than built. The cushions consisted of sacks of fluid with matted tops that squished down when something settled on them. The three headed being that had greeted me yesterday passed by not long after I awoke and made use of it. Various parts of the foliage appeared to interface with the being when it sat down, their fronds merging in a way that ruined my idea of holding hands forever.
Schhhhrkt introduced us, giving each of the three distinct lumps its own name, Srrt, Brrt and Phrrrt. Srrt was the seeing, talking part, Brrt the brawn and Phrrrt handled eating and digestion. Apparently they could separate into distinct parts for emergencies, but preferred to stay connected when possible. They were the equivalent of a tribal elder for the group. They made it very clear to me why I was here.
Apparently I, or rather, the me of my previous life, had chosen to be air-dropped into the green with a wiped memory, ready to undergo Sprrrt: to be genetically phased into a being that was part plant and part human. Schhhhrkt smiled at me kindly and said that it wasn’t that bad, once you got used to it. I looked at him politely and deepened my resolve to leave. I didn’t want underarm skin sacks or creepy tendrils.
When Srrt, Brrt and Phrrrt left I leaned into my developing rock juice addiction.
The rest of the day passed in a blur of colours twisting in from outside. At some point there was a huge deluge of rain. It started with large drops on the leaf roof. Then, as the tempo increased, twisted knots of vine at the canopy edges unfurled to catch the water where it ran off. I watched them swell in size as the outside disappeared behind a veil of hissing water. Strange cries rose up around me. I pressed myself against the earth, cold for the first time.
After the rain the green warmed up and I was sick again. As before, a tendril appeared bearing a gourd to catch it, flushing brighter this time. Then I knew no more.
# 6
The next morning it was sun in my eyes that woke me. I opened them and looked out, feeling my shoulder and thigh pressed into hard earth and a splitting sensation in my head. Through the light I saw the edge of my canopy and behind that two figures, crouched down, peering in at me. I froze, terrified.
One must have been the creature from yesterday. It had a back full of bristling branches and welts and, wrapped up in that, a shrivelled looking nut brown human form with squinting little eyes. It was like a fleshy seed inside a larger, wooden shell, staring at me. The other had a rumpled light green front aspect without any eyes at all, like a giant piece of celery. The sides of the head bore beautiful little ear shaped leaves, all pointed at me. I couldn’t tell if they were looking, or reaching.
Suddenly one of the wisps burst into our tableaux and buzzed around my observers. They creaked and groaned. This alerted Schhhrkt, who shooed them off. The wisp did a triumphant jiggle and swooshed away, though it didn’t go far. I watched it circling around outside like a sentry and felt deeply grateful.
That day, after topping up my rock, Schhhrkt cajoled me to come out of my earthy blankness and explore the dwelling. I moved cautiously, testing every step, staying clear of anything that stirred. He showed me a growth that bore different fruits. Enough to completely nourish me, he said. I tried several, one of which was decidedly fleshy. I couldn’t finish the bite. He showed me where I could defecate. I was grateful and, from the way it closed, so was the opening. I was immediately less grateful. Whoever I was, I didn’t trust these kinds of exchanges.
Shrrrkt told me about the rain catchers, how they slowly released their contents into a reservoir below the dwelling space, from which the other organisms could draw. He showed me several body sized gourds nestled in leaves behind the sitting area. One was Schhhrkt’s bed. Several looked full but he offered no explanation and I asked for none. Another lay open. He explained that I might sleep there one day and that it would ease my Sprrrt. I remained externally neutral on learning this.
Later, it rained again. I watched Schhhrkt rush out into the hissing curtain and disappear as the sound of shrieking I had heard yesterday started up. The water catchers began to unfurl and the glowing orb emerged from the grey mist. It sparked where the water passed through it and slipped under the canopy. Then it did something new.
It approached me gently and kind of nuzzled my shoulder, its glow intensifying. This was weirdly intimate. I didn’t know quite what to make of it and made no move, so we simply stayed that way in the centre of my earthy patch as the water tipped down, cold vapour drifting across my exposed skin and sparking around the glowing orb. For that moment, I felt less alone.
As usual, Schhhrkt returned sometime after the rain stopped. By then the orb was gone.
# 7
The next few days followed a similar pattern as I slowly adjusted to the green. There was typically a group of plant people watching me when I woke up. Two, three, or four of them. The one that had touched my face on the first morning was always there. Once there was a really huge one that moved like a giant blade of grass splitting. Another time a really beautiful one, with a head made entirely of flowers and beautiful patterns running down its chest, was there too. As soon as I stirred, the orb would buzz around my visitors until Schhhrkt noticed and waved them away.
Sometimes Srrt, Brrt and Phrrrt would pass by to enquire after me. I saw Schhhrkt holding up my vomit gourd for them to inspect on one occasion and wondered what that meant. But I didn’t want to ask, being happier to suck rock juice and bide my time, waiting for a chance.
It rained every day in the early afternoon. Schhhrkt always went out in it and then the orb would come and be with me. Sometimes it would nestle up against me like it did on that first day. A few times we played a kind of game, where it would bob in one direction or the other and I would copy its movements. After we played this game, it gave me extra nuzzles.
A few days later, I had grown accustomed to everything under the canopy and was starting to get curious about what was outside. When the rain started, Schhhrkt suggested I come with him, a few steps out into the downpour. “Don’t you want to know what all that shrieking is about?” he said with a smile.
I didn’t smile back but I allowed his to warm me. We parted the leaves around the water catchers and he led me by the hand for the first few steps. Then, as the water intensified, he rushed on a little further.
Standing outside of the canopy and inside of the rain, I watched as Schhhrkt’s body opened to the water, those extra sacks he had about his joints parting like the folds inside of citrus fruits. He raised everything of himself up to the sky to let the rain in. Parts of him swelled up and a shrieking sound came out of him to join the chorus. I looked around. Away through the hissing droplets I saw other forms, all like Schhhrkt; proffered to the heavens, swelling up, distending and ecstatic.
I vomited there in the wet grass and stumbled back into the dwelling, dazed. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of it. To imagine those things happening to my body was a dreadful, violating thought. I sat down inside of the canopy leaves and hugged my legs, shivering in my sodden clothes as the rain hissed on. The orb appeared, nuzzling against me. I ignored it. I couldn’t imagine why I would send myself to this. Had I done something terrible in my other life? Was the world I had come from so bereft of meaning that this fate seemed worth it? How could that be?
Slowly the rain eased. Schhhrkt stood some distance away, stuffed full of fluid, completely immobile. He was nothing like me, I realised. He had fooled me.
Then movement caught my eye.
The beautiful, flower headed creature was moving slowly through the drizzle. It too was swollen, but not enough to completely impede its movement. With slow steps it dragged its water sack behind it through the sodden grasses, shuffled past me and stopped at the small puddle of vomit I had left on the ground. Languorously it lifted a frilled foot and dipped it down into the sick. The reaction was immediate. The creature stiffened with pleasure. Its head of flowers turned toward me hungrily. Its beautifully patterned chest parted and a giant red bouquet of flesh unfolded out toward me, quivering.
Whatever it was offering, I didn’t want it. This was the moment I had been waiting for. I ran.
# 8
The ground splashed under my feet.
A shriek arose from the engorged plant people. I knew they would be slow to give chase and headed for the nearest undergrowth.
Then suddenly, there was my orb.
It swerved left.
Understanding, I followed.
We were playing the game for real now.
It led me straight towards one of the saturated plant people.
I slowed, hesitating, not wanting to get closer. But then it buzzed around their fruits and I realised it was suggesting I take provisions. I plucked several banana-like shapes from its armpits and hurried on.
I wasn’t in such a panic this time, so I could pace myself much better. And by now I was used to the feel of the green. It wasn’t so lurid and alien.
The wisp moved on ahead of me, inscribing a line of least resistance through the throbbing foliage that I could follow without getting grabbed by some bloodsucking geranium.
There were clumps of abrasive undergrowth that I had to hot-step through, low hanging razor vines and suchlike, but now that I could identify them I could generally avoid them.
We travelled up slight rises and dipped into hollows, tracked along a deep scar between two hillocks for a while and then came to a flatter part of the landscape where the more aggressive vegetation thinned out. I could see patches of sky. I stopped to catch my breath and look around as I ate my first banana.
Pools of water dotted the new landscape, ringed with scraggy patches of vegetation that looked less lively. After only a brief pause, my little bobbing friend made agitated movements, wanting me to continue. We set off again, traversing the smaller pools to stay under the bluff below the line where the green was more awake.
The ground was soft but navigable so we made good time. As I ran, I became aware of distant sounds across the marsh. Different sounds. Machine sounds.
The orb continued to lead me along the near edge of the marsh, keeping us closer to the green. I started to think this was a bad idea. At any moment one of the larger plant people could come rustling out of the bush and grab me. Whereas I was pretty sure that where there were machines, there would be people. People with faces, four limbs, memories and medical tools. I tried communicating this to my wispy guide but it did that agitated shaking move which seemed to mean, ‘There’s no time for your idiotic ideas, biped,’ and kept on leading me along the marsh edge. I scampered along behind.
What finally caused me to change course was a large three legged leaf creature that descended from the treelines behind us, just as I had feared. It was clear it would catch me if I continued on my present course, so I veered out into the wet ground. Strangely, both the leaf creature and my wisp performed, ‘No, don’t,’ gestures. But by then I had committed.
Almost immediately I was up to my thighs in deep mud. In shock I pulled myself out using the foliage growing around the pool, losing my boots to the quagmire. I rounded the water in several quick, splashy steps and leapt for the next patch of vegetation, earth enfolding my toes. The leaves clearly had firmer ground around them. Traversing in this way, I could somehow flounder across the wide open.
There was a fast swishing sound coming up behind me. It was the leaf creature. The boggy ground was no obstacle for it. In no time it was upon me. I braced. It was all around me, and… highly ineffective. It was like being stopped by, well, by a flurry of leaves. I swiped a hand through it and nearly ripped its limbs. It made a groaning sound. Had this thing once been human?
With a laugh I brushed it aside and continued my muddy clumping towards the other side of the marsh and the mechanical clonking. This thing was no threat. Then the wisp was up in my face, shaking itself at me in distress, its colours fluctuating. It performed darting noises, gesturing back the way I had come. I pulled up short, confused. Why could it not want me to go this way? I thought it had wanted to help me escape.
There was a series of crashing sounds behind me. I turned to look. Heavier creatures were emerging from the green now. Larger beings, very much capable of lifting me bodily up and carting me back. There was the walnut creature, there the head of flowers. Behind them came Schhhrkt.
Indecision over, I forged ahead. Rounding pools, leaping slop, flailing across the solid humps towards the trees on the far edge and what I could now make out to be a ravine or canyon beyond. It was shrouded in mist, full with the clanking sound of toiling machines.
Both the wisp and the leaf creature were now trailing me, flapping around uncertainly. Then the wisp took on a new approach, sweeping ahead and lunging towards me, like it had that first time we met, as if it was trying to help me avoid– but there was only increasingly firm mud and grass. I pressed on toward the ravine edge and then, too late, my foot came down on something hard and metallic that lit up around my foot in a little ring of red lights.
My momentum carried me over it and I was unable to completely arrest my foot. I looked back uncomprehendingly at the strange sight of those little lights as they began to flicker.
The wisp went a very pale green and pulled away from me. The leaf creature wrapped itself rapidly around my foot, swelling the size of my leg as it desperately swaddled me, wrapping my body with a swishing sound, insulating me.
The blast ripped through us both, shredding us alike, effortlessly. Sending me flying. Pain ripped through my fractured being like a noise, like a light. I knew no more.
# 9
I woke in the gathering blues of dusk to a broad, dull ache that stretched in all directions around me, going out ahead of my strangely absent body. I lay where I must have fallen, wedged between two trees at the edge of the ravine. Twisted between them, looking forwards into the chasm I had sought.
There were earth and small stones in my mouth. The rich taste of blood. I didn’t want to look back at the remains of my body. I looked down instead, into the mouth of hell.
The green stopped with the cliff. Below me the soft earth lay all asunder, the rocky bones of the planet exposed, as far as I could see. There were shreds of vegetation visible between the great gouges, as ripped and rent as I knew my own body to be.
It had been torn this way and that by the machines. They stood on dips and hollows of the great bareness, logically arranged in a destructive pattern of maximum efficiency.
As the blues fell away to black, they dug on, arc lights blazing, engines chugging against the gentle night that they were steadily erasing. I felt my own undoing, like the world had turned itself inside out and now my innards lay bare and exposed on the plain before me, bleeding out into the rising dark.
There were several men down there, standing beside their machines, looking up at me in surprise and anger.
My wisp came then, hovering before me. I saw it send something down, toward the nearest machines. A flickering cord. In reply, a strand of light rose from the nearest machine and attached to my wisp like a root. I could see a man down there, running to try and stop it, wrestling with his machine. But it didn’t make any difference.
The strangest thing happened. A woman unfolded out of my bobbing orb in petals of light until she stood upon the air before me, the night sky her shawl.
She looked down at me in a way that confirmed my worst fears. I was broken and dying. Her face showed sorrow and regret. Strong feelings you would expect from a dear friend. Or a lover.
“Oh, Daniel,” she said.
So that was my name. Daniel. And I knew myself then, through her. The edges of me were defined by her. They had been for some time.
“Why couldn’t you just follow me? It wasn’t far to the transport. It wasn’t far at all.”
She began to cry. Somehow her sadness was louder than the clanking machines. Her hands circled her big round belly as she sobbed.
Then there was movement beside me. Something corporeal.
It was Schhhhrkt, looking deeply concerned. He lay his hand upon my head and dripped juice into my mouth from his wrist. It flooded through me as he spoke but seemed unable to reach my fingers and toes.
“You should not have run,” he said. “But you did.”
He spoke with great sadness. “And now you are dying. But you must not. You are the key.”
The woman in the air put her hand over her mouth.
“We can save you. Though you will not be the same.” said Schhhrkt. “But it will not be easy now. It will be fast. And painful.” He looked down at the ground. “You should not have run,” he repeated.
He came closer then and looked into my eyes, the green glinting out of them with all of its weird promise. “Do you want to live? And to fight – this?” he gestured out behind him at the gash in the world that was also the hole where my body should be. “Do you want to finish what you started, when you were this Daniel?”
I could feel myself fading. But I did not want to fade. “Yes.” I said. I was Daniel. I wanted to live. I wanted to know this beautiful, sad woman again.
Schhhhrkt nodded and gestured. There was the head of flowers and the walnut woman. They came in close and spread out their arms, unfurling themselves over my head and into what was left of me, weaving.
# 10
What happened that night is unspeakable. I saw things no one should see. I felt things that should go unfelt.
I burst. And was made anew. Flooding into being… something else.
Passing myself, I grew. Watching bone and muscle drift by and fold in. Rising upward, digging in.
Schhhhrkt stood by me the whole time. And the woman made of light, cradling her belly, as my head exploded with pain until everything went white.
Then the morning came and there I stood, green and new.
# 11
And here I stand still. The first of a new breed.
It was a common saying in the twentieth century, often used by hippies and later by post ironic post hippy pessimists. They would say, “I want to be a tree” and they would stand on one leg with their arms outstretched like a yoga pose.
Well, I really am tree. And a person.
I am a living tree person, called Daniel.
Some people call us treople. Some call us luildings. In German it’s Lebäude. In Tolkinese it’s Ent. Harraway saw our revolutionary potential coming.
We are the missing step. Legally useful for putting an end to mankind’s insatiable need to destroy, we act as a buffer for the living world. A human who is also a plant cannot be uprooted, you see. Because while to uproot a human is just what happens, to uproot a person who is a tree is to kill them. Therefore we – my children and I – are a full stop to digging and exploitation.
Also, we are a home.
# 12
The woman made of light who tried to rescue me was called Faye. It’s fitting, really. The Fae were the displaced peoples, pushed to forests edge.
Back where she came from – where Daniel came from, we had lived a life together, Faye and I. We loved one another, pledged ourselves to each other, planned to start a family together. But couldn’t.
Our bodies wouldn’t allow us to.
It wasn’t clear why, but it just wasn’t happening. We tried, she told me. Often. Growing increasingly desperate. And meanwhile, the living world was being stripped apart and broken by the mad, desperate humans whose aims remain opaque to me. Making the whole endeavour seem futile.
At some point, she said I gave up. I told her goodbye and I signed up to be a living experiment in gene manipulation. To find a human solution for the plant population. I offered my DNA up as a stepping stone for the resistance.
To make it easier for myself, I opted to forget so that I would stay focused on the goal and not try to run back if I got scared. My patience for failure had run out, she told me. And that’s how my story began.
But then, miracle of miracles, Faye became pregnant with the last of my seed that had been saved. But by then it was too late for me. By then there was no possibility of extraction.
She told me all this with tears streaming down her face as she stood there, a beam of light looking down at my broken remains, scattered in the earth. And up at my new body, rising as a trunk, branching to leaves above her.
I looked out at her with my giant green eye and it all came flooding back, just as it began to fade away. Thoughts of intention are strongly tied to the form that you take. A body like mine now is struggles with remembering a plight like mine then was, if you see what I mean.
I caught that sadness though, and to look at her, I could see that she was mostly beautiful, this delicate thing of arms and legs.
She stood there cupping her belly, looking up at me. At the same time she was standing on the soft, white carpet of her living room in a square white room hundreds of kilometres away. In both places her face and her heart contained a complex mixture of intense and contradictory feelings, burning all at once.
I said, “It’s OK. Don’t worry,” not knowing what I was saying. Just speaking out of reflex. Remembering that was what one said, when one could actually do nothing. But then I realised that I could make her an offer. I said, “You can come and live in my heart.”
Normally, statements like this are mostly sentiment and metaphor. But I meant it.
What had once been my heart was now a huge cavern with plenty of room. There was space in the weave of my body for plenty of little humans.
Faye moved in one hundred years ago and it is here that our child was born.
We called her Peanut.
# 13
I watched them both grow old and die, one by one, measuring each day by their smiles and the changing in the light. Feeding them with love and the food from my branches. Protecting them from the rain. Encouraging their quick, mad desires as best I could while the wind tugged at my branches.
They did not live alone. They were the first of many to come to forests edge. Faye and I welcomed the next generation when Peanut was old enough. And as they grew, we watched the forest spread out across the rent earth below us, as the diggers and haulers grew overgrown and teased apart by fresh generations of roots and shoots.
Peanut was the first of many children for me, though the only human. After that I bore other fruits. First these were taken by Schhhhrkt and planted along the edge of the barren waste to form a solid line of defence. Then we sent our fruits further afield, carried by the indigenous tribes and willing others to the four corners of the Earth.
To defend Our soil.
In that sense I am a little like Genghis Khan, only his inverse.
Whereas his was a tide of blood and glory, mine was a wave of peaceful shoots and leaves.
My children can be found scattered around the world now. Everywhere clawing back the line between the chaotic inklings of humans and the vast, endless green.
www.sambunn.net 